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Game theory. If the idea occurred to you, then one can almost guarantee it will eventually occur to others - and to someone at your competitor.

With that understanding, there's only one rational course of action: to secure your supply before they do, and your competitor realized all this.

The only real decision to make is whether to risk the more aggressive move of also locking up your competitor's supply.

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There's risk to that. The customer company could have gone tits up or shit-canned whatever project they were using the finished castings for "because 'rona" leaving whoever is sitting on a year of castings in a bad position. There's risk to both approaches.

Based on their example, in practice the decision is between dealing with reality and following management framework dogma at all costs.

Game theory offers amazing insights, but it doesn't really deal with internal company politics, the power of business consultants and the desire to obtain silver bullets.

Could it be that quarterly/annual budgets make one assume participation in a finite game, rather than infinite? That's precisely the kind of thing the author of the tweet chain seems to be describing.

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